


breakable, and mendable, but difficult to match

by helveticaneue



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: 2018 World Juniors, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, F/F, Friends With Benefits, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-28
Updated: 2018-03-28
Packaged: 2019-03-26 09:55:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13855374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helveticaneue/pseuds/helveticaneue
Summary: Casey has never, ever been the loudest person in the room. She’s a girl surrounded by almost two dozen boys at all times, and they’ve always managed to be louder. Brady, though, Brady takes up space. It’s not because she’s 6’3 and broad shouldered, it’s because she makes a lot of noise, says “I’m here” and makes it impossible to ignore her.





	breakable, and mendable, but difficult to match

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stonesnuggler](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stonesnuggler/gifts).



> This story was really therapeutic for me to write. It's about being the only girl in a room full of boys and not liking that, but loving them anyway. It's about loving girls and navigating how tough it is even long after you know who you are. Not to sound like I was in the Glee fandom in 2011, but it's about being a part of something special.
> 
> You can probably tell given that the plot of this is that Casey Mittelstadt is a giant lesbian, but this is my ideal world, and in this world the CWHL/NWHL and NHL have comparable salary averages. 
> 
> Title comes from an answer to the question "Why am I a spinster?" published in Tit-Bits magazine in 1889. I had actually written the bulk of this story when I discovered this magazine, and it was too perfect not to use.
> 
> Also, there is a brief mention of weight/size in this fic. If you think that might be potentially triggering to you, there is more info in the end notes. Thanks to A for the beta and S for everything!

Only two girls even make the preliminary roster for Team USA. You can’t just be good at hockey to make it, you have to be better than all the boys. Casey went in the top ten of the draft. Brady is about to go in the top five, maybe.

They just sort of nod at each other in the locker room, that first day. They know each other, of course. It’s not that all the girls who have a shot at the show know each other, but Casey and Brady have always run in the same circles. And, of course, everyone knows Brady by her reputation, but she’s good enough and scary enough that everything said about her is behind her back and not to her face.

Brady makes eye contact with her and smirks, and Casey is a little too caught in it to smile back. It’s broken, though, by Patrick Harper arriving loudly and crowing “Ay, Tit Bits, how was your break?”

“Isn’t that kind of sexist?” Tufte asks quietly beside her. Casey ignores him, because he’s from the clearly inferior U of M campus, though she privately agrees as Brady greets ‘Harpy, my bitch’ just as loudly and enthusiastically, pulling him into a hug. She’s like half a foot taller than him, and Casey laughs a little to herself before turning back to her gear.

Casey has never, ever been the loudest person in the room. She’s a girl surrounded by almost two dozen boys at all times, and they’ve always managed to be louder. Brady, though, Brady takes up space. It’s not because she’s 6’3 and broad shouldered, it’s because she makes a lot of noise, says “I’m here” and makes it impossible to ignore her. Casey’s gotten used to changing in a locker room full of boys, gotten used to pushing away the self-conscious idea that they could be staring, but Brady is fully unashamed.

It’s admirable. It’s brave. It’s kind of weird that Casey wishes she could be Brady when she grows up, since Brady is nearly a year younger, but she’s so self-assured in a way Casey has never felt. She acts like one of the guys when Casey has never felt like anything but an outsider on any team she’s played on, whether being the only girl on the Eden Prairie team or on the women’s team at the U.

Brady has her arm slung around Harper’s neck, is laughing loudly at something he’s saying, is the center of all the attention in the room. Casey goes back to her gear.

===

They’re sharing a room, of course, in Buffalo. It’s not like USA Hockey, as traditional as they are, would ever let them share a room with boys. Technically, they aren’t even supposed to go into their teammates rooms, but the coaches won’t enforce that.

“Yay, girl power,” Brady says sarcastically as she drops her bags on the bed closest to the door. “You ready to paint your nails and braid each other’s hair? Have a pillow fight in our underwear?”

“I think they put us together so you wouldn’t sleep with any of our teammates,” Casey says, uncharitably. She remembers that Brady’s never really played on a team with another girl before, is the first to ever get granted an exemption by the NCAA and play on a men’s team, because Keith Tkachuk is scary as shit. She’s used to sharing with guys, because that’s how it worked in the NTDP.

Brady looks at her, guileless, “Why would that stop me?”

Casey swallows. Brady grins at her, cocky and self-assured as Casey has always known her from afar.

“Never mind,” Casey says, and sets her stuff down next to the far bed.

===

“Oh, mama, don’t you cry,” Brady yells, already hoarse, and they echo her, twenty-two voices rising into one, nine goals scored on the Danish goalie. USA hockey is do or fucking die. Casey has never felt has at home as she does in moments like these, the team with their arms around each other, all gloriously sweaty, chanting the words that so many have chanted before them.

They aren’t in a foreign land, they’re in Buffalo, the place that Casey is going to call home soon. She’s going to sign a paper and this city will be hers, one day. But first, World Juniors. First, a repeat, going all the way, going for gold.

They’ve got vodka to mix with their Gatorade once they’re changed out of sweaty gear and back at the hotel, just across the street, where the visiting teams stay when they’re playing the Sabres.

Casey leans into Yammer on one side, Bells on the other, and shouts out the words of the chant they all know well at this point with the rest of the team. They just kicked Denmark’s fucking ass.

===

Brady is not a terrible roommate, objectively. Casey can’t complain about her mess when she’s just as messy, if not more. But she keeps, like, _staring_.

It’s a little unnerving, honestly. Casey isn’t the type of girl people look at. Whenever Casey catches her looking, Brady just smiles, kind of smug, and doesn’t look away. That’s unnerving too.

Brady is a lot more forward than pretty much any girl Casey has ever met. She’s totally unashamed. She also has a crazy fucking body, long, muscular legs, amazing tits that Casey let herself look at once in the locker room when she was feeling a little weak.

So it’s sort of a foregone conclusion that Casey gets a little turned on when she catches Brady staring, like this is all leading up to something.

She hadn’t known that Brady liked girls — all the rumors are about her hooking up with teammates, UMich frat guys and then, recently, BU frat guys. But other than the _staring_ , Brady makes comments when they’re watching TV together, or joins in the guys conversation about some hot actress or model they all thirst follow.

“Why’d you wanna play college hockey, Brades?” Kieffer crows in an exaggerated Boston accent amid an argument about who will win the NCAA championship this year.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Brady says, slinging an arm around Casey and tugging her close. “For the girls.”

She squeezes Casey’s shoulder and Casey just knows, then, probably by her totally real lesbian intuition, that she isn’t joking.  

“That’s why I went to the WHL,” Kailer says.

“For the girls?” Brownie asks, forehead wrinkling.

“Nah,” Kailer says. “For the dudes.” He winks at Brownie, who turns pink to jeers from the guys.

Back in their room, Casey sits on her bed and pulls out her laptop, planning on watching Black Mirror. Brady jumps onto her bed and sits opposite her, cross legged, with a nail file.

“What’s up?” Casey asks.

Brady raises her eyebrows at her. Casey watched her carefully draw them on hours ago, and ribbed her a little about them.

“Just sitting,” Brady says. She starts filing her nails. She doesn’t break eye contact.

“Okay,” Casey says. It’s not creepy, how Brady is looking at her, just really intense. Like, Casey is maybe getting a little wet because Brady looks like she wants to eat her alive intense.

Casey’s type is sort of girls who could beat her up. Brady definitely could.

Brady glances down at her nails, looks back up at Casey, and licks her lips, and Casey isn’t sure if she’s missing something or if she’s reading Brady really, really right.

===

The snow falls in a way that isn’t magical or transformative, not like the way snowfall can be. It blankets everything like an inconvenience, not like a Robert Frost poem.

But they win, anyway, and Casey assists on every goal, and she doesn’t score in the shootout but Brady scores and so does Bells, and Casey is fucking freezing to the bone but she’s happy.

Brady’s eye black is fading to gray, a single messy line across her face, and she actually kind of pulls it off, in a weird way. Casey just looks sort of ridiculous, she thinks, but at least not as bad as Yammer and Foxy with their tiger stripes that remind Casey of the face paint at high school pep rallies.

“Hey, Case,” Brady calls across the locker room. “My face is cold. You wanna sit on it to warm it up?”

The room devolves into hoots and wolf whistles, and Casey is glad that she hasn’t washed off the eye black smeared across her cheeks because she can feel heat rise to them.

She sighs, tries to pull off casual. “I suppose I can.”

“Get it, Case!” Lindy hollers, and Casey flips him off. She sits with him on the bus back from Orchard Park and endures the chirping from the midwest guys while Brady holds court with the Boston and CHL boys in the back of the bus.

“I’m getting laid tonight while you all have to stick with your own hand in the shower,” she tells them, and they look a little shame faced.

“Hey, can I watch?” Perunovich says, and Casey appreciates the fact that at least three guys jump to hiss at him, Lindy saying “Don’t be a dick, Scotty.”

“Thanks, Lindy,” Casey says to him quietly.

Lindy looks at her a little weird. “Of course, dude. I’m not going to let people harrass you.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Casey tells him.

“It is, though,” Lindy says. “I know you can take care of yourself and all, but, like, I want to be an ally and a safe space for you.”

Casey narrows her eyes at him. “Did you go to a seminar?”

“I mean, yeah, but, Case, there are a lot of bad guys in hockey. I’m not trying to be one of them.”

“I — I really appreciate that, Ryan,” Casey says, and she thinks it comes across as touched as she feels. She’s played with guys who she considers to be good people in the past, a lot of them, but no teammate has ever actually come up to her and offered their support.

“Cool,” Ryan says. “So, Brady?”

“She’s got great tits,” Casey says earnestly.

“She kind of scares me,” Ryan confides.

“Me too,” Casey says. “I don’t really mind that though.”

===

Brady clearly has a lot of practice, Casey thinks, in her lap on her bed in their hotel room. She’s aggressive — knows what she wants and gets it. She rolls them over, gets Casey on her back with one thigh between Casey’s, and Casey hasn’t dated much but her last girlfriend was shorter and Brady’s got three solid inches on Casey with wide shoulders and crazy muscles that make Casey want to sit on her lap and feel her biceps like a cheerleader and her football player boyfriend in some weird heterosexual fantasy.

“Hey,” Brady says. “You promised to sit on my face.”

“Yeah, I did,” Casey says, suddenly feeling slightly intimidated as Brady pushes at her team-issue sweatpants, bracing her hands on Brady’s shoulders and lifting her knees so Brady can get them off.

Brady leans forward for a kiss, and Casey almost gasps into it before she’s pulling away, leaning back and propping herself up on her elbows. “Well, come on then.”

Casey knee walks her way up Brady’s body, settles hovering over her face. Brady’s hands curl over her thighs.

“Grab the headboard,” she says. “Trust me.”

Casey grips the headboard and Brady pushes down on her thighs. Casey’s thighs aren’t exactly small, but neither are Brady’s hands, and they’re calloused and strong against her skin.

Then — one broad, long stroke of Brady’s tongue and Casey is glad that she’s holding herself up on the headboard. It’s been a while since anyone that wasn’t her was getting her off, and an equally long time since she’s been eaten out. And Brady, Casey realizes, as she flicks her tongue right over Casey’s clit, is really fucking good at this.  

Casey is on top, sure, but Brady is the one directing this, hands tight, almost bruising, on Casey’s thighs. She sucks on Casey’s clit, and Casey falls forward with a whine, hair falling in her face.

Brady pushes at Casey’s thighs a little and pulls off with a wet noise, her hot breath teasing Casey’s sensitive folds. She turns her face into Casey’s thigh, saying something under her breath, muffled by her thigh.

“What?” Casey asks.

“I said, nice,” Brady tells her, louder.

“Oh,” Casey says, inexplicably a little embarrassed.

Brady hums, and goes back to licking at Casey’s folds. Whenever Casey is just getting used to Brady’s mouth and whatever she’s doing with her tongue, Brady switches strategies, alternating sucking and and little flicks.

“God, you’re so good at this,” she says, and Brady hums.

Casey has to hold tight to the headboard, curl her fingers around it to keep her hips from moving too much, and the heat and pressure from Brady’s mouth gets to her before long, has her biting her lip to try to hold back a whine that comes out anyway and coming hard.

She has to rest her forehead against the wall and breathe, until Brady pushes at her thighs again, prompting her to move. Casey does, curls up at Brady’s side and Brady turns to face her and God — her face is shiny-wet and that’s Casey’s wetness, all over her. Casey can’t help but kiss her, then, not really to taste herself on Brady’s lips or anything, but in thanks, and because Brady is hot as fuck like this and she can’t help it.

Brady takes Casey’s hand, guides it to one of her perfect tits, and Casey’s breath catches because she’s kind of been waiting for this for what feels like her entire life. And maybe it’s Brady’s assertiveness that’s getting to her, too, how she’s taking charge of this all and Casey’s girlfriends have never really been that type.

She plays with Brady’s nipple with her thumb then bends down to suck on on the other one, and it’s gratifying, the way Brady sort of gasps a little, says “Yeah, that’s good.”

Casey sucks a bruise into the spot just over the swell of her breast, and Brady squirms.

“Hey, hey,” Brady says, and her voice is delightfully breathy. “Touch me, please.” She punctuates her words by grabbing Casey’s hand and guiding it again, down between her thighs and, fuck, she’s so wet. Casey’s fingers slip finding Brady’s clit, but when she does find it Brady straight up whines, a noise Casey never expected from her and immediately wants to hear again. “You can finger me,” she says.

“You’re so wet, I bet you could take two right away,” Casey says, and Brady groans and pushes into her fingers, which Casey takes as a _yes, please_. She pushes two fingers in, presses her thumb against Brady’s clit. “Could you come like this, do you think, just getting fingered?”

“Yes, yeah,” Brady pants, into Casey’s neck. “More, fuck, more.”

“Already?” Casey teases, but she obliges, and Brady’s hand tightens where it’s resting on Casey’s hip, and she fucking sobs.

Brady’s curls tickle Casey’s cheek and she presses up, looking for the g-spot and oh — oh, there it is.

Brady whines again, high and gorgeous and right in Casey’s ear, and Casey rubs her thumb against Brady’s clit, times it with the pressure she’s putting on Brady’s g-spot, and Brady tightens up around her fingers, sobbing again, “Casey, Casey, Casey.”

Casey pulls her fingers out and wipes them on Brady’s thigh and Brady whines at that too, pulls at Casey’s shoulder until Brady’s on her back, Casey sprawled on top of her.

Brady breathes loud in the quiet room, and Casey can hear her own heart beating. Neither of them say anything, but it’s a comfortable silence, pleased and calm.

“You came while I was spelling ‘God bless the USA’ with my tongue,” Brady tells her softly, and Casey has to bury her face in Brady’s chest to giggle, almost hysterically.

God bless the USA, indeed.

===

This isn’t Casey’s grand romance. They aren’t madly in love, and she doesn’t think they ever will be. This is a tournament fling, sex on the convenience of sharing a room for two weeks, and that’s all.

They’re sort of friends, her and Brady. According to all the articles, they have a lot in common. It’s probably just because they’re girls. They’ve been forced together by circumstance — two girls close in age who grew up playing on boys teams. Casey thinks if she met Brady at school they wouldn’t be friends. They’re too different.

Brady is brash and stubborn and forward, and Casey is quieter, more subtle, all drive and desperation. It’s the same as on the ice, where Casey will dance her way through the opposition when Brady is all brute force and shouldering guys off the puck. Casey likes that about Brady, that she’s the same person on the ice as she is off it. She’s honest, not just in way she plays but in the way she is.

The articles are right though, at least a little bit, that there’s a kinship in both being girls playing with the boys. Brady gets it, why Casey entered the NHL draft rather than waiting to finish college and get drafted to the NWHL. Casey doesn’t need to explain herself like she has to all the reporters and teammates.

She can’t tell any of the girls on the Gophers what she tells Brady, that she didn’t like how Jack Eichel's arm slung around her easily, the way he leered at her, the way Sam Reinhart didn't seem to take anything she said seriously or how Rasmus Ristolainen didn't seem to think she deserved to be there. She wasn't going to sign the contract anyway, was always planning on going to school, but Buffalo grated on her, in a way that made her never want to come back. Here she is, though, at World Juniors. In a city that everyone says is going to be hers. It doesn't sit quite right. The girls would say “Just don’t go, play in the NWHL instead,” or “Wait for free agency.” Brady won’t do that.

Casey is like, really grateful that she went so high and all, but she just doesn't know about Buffalo. She likes the camaraderie of the guys on team USA just as much as she likes the team atmosphere at the U, but the guys in Buffalo, on her brief visit, felt different.

Brady listens quietly, says, “I heard things about Eichel, at BU. There are worse guys, but — Find someone on the team you can trust to protect you.”

She gets it, the list of guys to avoid that’s been quietly passed around, the way you can’t ever fully trust some of your teammates. The way the jokes in the locker room sting and you still can’t say anything, because you don’t want to be that girl. Brady played for the NTDP for two years. Casey had only lasted two games.

So it’s not a love story for the ages, but they curl up together in Casey’s bed and Brady kisses her breasts and her neck and eats her out until she sobs, fingers her open with goalscoring hands and makes her come again. Casey touches Brady more tentatively, until Brady talks her through eating her out in return, the way she likes.

“You’re good at that,” she says, when Casey crawls back up the bed and collapses half across her, so she can comfortably grope her perfect chest.

“Oh, thanks,” Casey says. “I don’t do it a lot, so—”

“I mostly sleep with guys,” Brady says. “Easier, you know. None of them can get it right.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Casey says. “I’m not really into that.”

“Sure, sure,” Brady says. “I kinda wish I wasn’t. But guys are fun, sometimes. For sex, at least. I’ve never really dated anyone.”

“Mm, it’s nice,” Casey says. “My ex used to write me poetry. It wasn’t that good, though.”

Brady laughs, bright. “That’s really fucking lesbian. ‘Her poetry wasn’t that good,’” she mocks.

“God, I know,” Casey says. “But it really wasn’t. I met this girl I like now, Maya, in English class, though? And she writes really great poetry.”

“Is she pretty?” Brady asks.

“ _So_ pretty. She’s, like, amazing,” Casey says. “She does slam poetry and is majoring in Environmental Engineering. She is way too cool for me.”

“Are her tits as good as mine?” Brady teases.

“Impossible, you have great tits,” Casey says, patting the breast she’s been palming for emphasis. “I don’t know why they call you Tit Bits, because they are not bits. They are gorgeous.”

“That’s sort of the joke,” Brady says, but doesn’t elaborate. “I haven’t really met anyone that I like enough to date. But I guess I’m not really trying.”

“That’s okay,” Casey tells her. “Sometimes you aren’t, like, ready for a relationship or whatever.”

“So this girl,” Brady says, instead of really replying. “You gonna ask her out?”

“I can’t! She’s really cool. She probably thinks I’m a dumb jock, or something.”

“Wait, Case, does she even like hockey?” Brady asks. “Because I don’t think you can date someone who doesn’t like hockey. I forbid it.”

“No, she doesn’t, but at least she has eyebrows,” Casey says.

“You bitch!” Brady shrieks, and rolls Casey over to pin her, which is sort of what Casey was going for, as she tilts her head up for another kiss.    

===

"So, Buffalo," Brady says.

"Buffalo," Casey agrees.

"It's going to be your city."

"Yeah," Casey says. "I guess it is."

“Pretty,” Brady says, gesturing out towards the falls.

“Fucking cold,” Casey counters.

“Like you,” Brady tells her, half grinning. “Pretty and ice fucking cold.”

Most people don’t catch onto that, with Casey. Most people just see the surface level, the Minnesota nice, the sweet girl who couldn’t do a single fucking pull up. But Casey’s also the girl who went eighth overall despite that.

“You kind of have to be, to make it.”

“Sure,” Brady says. “You kind of do.”

===

Casey braids her hair in the locker room before every game, and she’s gotten pretty practiced at it now, threading strands over and under each other.

But some days her hair just doesn’t cooperate how she wants it to. No matter how many times she starts over, her braids are coming out lumpy.

“Hey, Case,” Brady says softly, pushing Tufte’s skates to the side to make a spot where she can sit on the bench. “Want me to do it for you? I always used to braid Taryn’s before field hockey when she was little.”

“Oh,” Casey says. “Sure.”

“Cool,” Brady says. “Sit on the floor in front of me? I need to be able to reach.”

Casey folds herself into position on the floor, and hands Brady her hair ties.

Brady is just as practiced as Casey, clearly, and she starts weaving Casey’s hair into a french braid easily. “You’re such a useless lesbian,” she says fondly.

“Isn’t that kind of offensive?” Tufte asks.

“Not if I’m gay,” Brady says, tugging on Casey’s hair.

“Oh, I guess,” Tufte says. “I’m definitely not an expert on that, I just took a woman’s studies class this semester.”

“Good for you,” Brady says, flat.

“So would it be offensive if I called Case a useless lesbian?” Foxy asks.

“Yes,” Brady, Casey, and Riley chorus.

“I’ll break your nose if you call her that,” Brady says, and she sounds serious.

“Right, okay,” Foxy says, and goes back to taping his stick with considerably more focus than he was before.

Brady ties off Casey’s left braid and taps her on the head. “Good?” she asks.

Casey feels along the braids. Not a bump. “Great, thanks.”

“Any time,” Brady says, and when Casey stands up she does too, wandering back to her stall.

===

“Bells, Bells, Bellsy,” Brady is saying, holding Kieffer’s face in her hands. “Kieffer Bellows. Did you know that you have beautiful eyes? Beautiful eyes and a tiny mouth. It’s so small.”

Kieffer has been sending pleas for help at Casey with his eyes for a solid minute now, and she finally takes pity on him.

“Okay, Brades, we get that Kieffer is very pretty. Time to let him go drink and celebrate his goal now.”

Brady reluctantly lets go of Kieffer’s face, but as soon as she turns to face Casey she looks delighted. “Casey! Your hair is so pretty, can I touch it?”

Casey doesn’t know what she expected Brady to be like drunk, but affectionate and overly complimentary wasn’t it. She kind of likes this side of Brady, though, a Brady without the hard edges to her boisterousness, a Brady without her armor.

Casey walks Brady down the hall back to their room, Brady informing her that “I can fuck three guys faster than you can say ‘Don’t fuck three guys.’”

“Doesn’t take you that long, huh?” Casey jokes.

“Doesn’t take _them_ that long,” Brady says, leaning against the wall while Casey searches for her room key. “Mine’s in my back pocket. You can take it.”

Casey sighs and reaches around Brady to reach her back pocket. She lets them in the room and Brady collapses back onto her bed with emphasis.

“I don’t want to sleep with all those guys, you know,” she says earnestly.

“Bray—”

“It’s like, I want a girlfriend, but I get so lonely, and I want someone to touch me, and hooking up with guys is easier,” Brady’s face scrunches up in a frown. “They’re, like, mean to me, a lot. I’m not skinny, or pretty, or whatever. I’m bigger than fucking Matty. Girls are supposed to be smaller than their brothers, I think.”

Casey knows what it feels like to not be the pretty girl. There are some really gorgeous girls on the Gophers. She isn’t one of them. Neither of them are getting, like, fucking yogurt sponsorships or anything. They aren't Hilary Knights or Ludmila Belyakovas. Casey thinks, uncharitably, that no matter how much better she is, she'll never make the same kind of money the pretty ones do. She won't ever get asked to do the Body Issue, just stupid hockey magazine covers where she eats chicken wings.

“I’m bigger than my brothers, too,” she says. “Our bodies are for hockey, not for boys. We don’t have to be pretty.”

“I just want them to be nice to me,” Brady says.

“Someday,” Casey tells her. “Someday really soon you’re going to meet a nice girl, and she’s going to be awesome, and you aren’t going to have to have sex with all those guys.”

“You’re so nice, Casey,” Brady says. “I hope my nice girl is like you.”

Casey swallows. “Minnesota nice,” she says, and pets Brady’s hair in an attempt to comfort her. “I hope she’s even nicer.”

===

Being on a line with Brady is the most exhilarating thing Casey has ever felt. She doesn’t think it’s bragging when she says she’s used to being one of the most talented people on a team. On this team, there are a lot of guys who probably come close to her, but Brady is the best of them.

Brady passes her the puck and she knows what to do, sends it past Luukkonen top shelf. It’s — okay, she’s the top scorer in this tournament, she knows she can fucking score, but the way Brady slams into her, screams in her ear “Useful fucking lesbian!” in a way that feels like an inside joke and a celebration all the same — it’s kind of fucking magical. It’s like they get each other on the ice, and they get each other off it too.

Casey doesn’t know what she’s going to do when this tournament is over. She doesn’t even like Brady, really, not just in the middle school way. Brady isn’t a likeable person. She’s grating and mean but also — Casey really fucking likes Brady, the way she seems to get it, get _her_. She thinks she might even love her. Definitely not in the romantic way, but in a way where she kind of needs Brady in her life now, after two weeks, needs her steady snark and the way she’s brutally honest, needs how all the guys call her a bitch behind her back because it’s true but how she’ll fight for what matters to her anyway.

Casey thinks she might matter to Brady. Brady, at least, matters to her.

===

They lose to Sweden. They fucking lose. And Casey can’t say she couldn’t have seen this coming, maybe, but she wanted it so much she didn’t even think about the possibility. Seven people on this team have won a gold medal and she isn’t one of them. She probably won’t ever be one of them.

Brady’s nursing the hand that she punched the locker room wall with, but at least she fucking scored. Casey couldn’t buy a point.

“Hey,” Joey says, not having to pitch his voice very loud, in the room muted by defeat. “We’re going to win bronze, okay? I know we wanted gold, I know _I_ wanted gold, but from now on our goal is bronze, cool? We think about bronze like it’s all we ever wanted.”

Brady looks up from her hand, with a look on her face like Casey’s never seen. Casey doesn’t think she’s angry, at least not anymore.

“After we win we say ‘USA Hockey is do or die,’ but it’s still do or die after a loss, too. I’d give fucking everything for this team, and I know you would too. Winning—” Joey’s voice cracks. “Winning a gold medal last year made that team a family, but it would be just as much of an honor to win a bronze medal with you guys. Or even not win a medal, but I kind of still really fucking want to, so let’s do that, okay?”

The team starts cheering around her, and Casey joins in. Peeksy slings an arm around Joey and says “Great fucking speech, Cap,” Lindy pulls Casey in close and she leans her head against this shoulder, and she thinks about how much she loves this fucking team. And she wanted gold, she really fucking did, but at least they have this. At least they have the bronze medal game in the morning, and Casey has Brady, and Lindy, and the fucking assholes on this team that she loves anyway. Maybe they aren’t chanting that ‘USA Hockey is do or die’ together, but it still is.

===

Bronze still isn’t gold, but Casey isn’t really thinking about it when Brady is pulling her close in the locker room, dipping her and kissing her deep to cheers from their teammates. It’s still a medal around her neck, pop music blasting, beers getting passed around the locker room.

Maybe tomorrow, when she has to say goodbye to this team and go back to Minnesota, the bronze will feel different. Maybe tomorrow it’ll feel disappointing. But it isn’t tomorrow, and Casey’s not in Minneapolis, and Brady’s not in Boston. This team is still a family, not a group of people who got thrown together for two weeks after Christmas.

They circle up, arms around each other, and Brady screams the words they all know by heart, and they all echo her.

It’s hard to say Casey’s different, after two weeks, but she thinks she might be. She thinks she could be brave.

  


**Author's Note:**

> At a point in this fic, Brady makes a self-deprecating comment about being bigger than her brother. There is a brief conversation regarding appearances and how it affects relationships, careers, etc. If you would like to skip this section it begins with "“Bells, Bells, Bellsy," and ends with "I hope she's even nicer."
> 
> If you have any concerns about possible triggers to be noted or additional tags, please contact me on [tumblr](https://helveticanouveau.tumblr.com/). I currently don't feel comfortable having anonymous comments turned on, but I will not publish your ask publicly if it's something of this nature. You can also hmu if you wanna talk rule 63, lesbians, Team USA and the Tampa Bay Lightning.


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